Plans to protect the Thwaites Glacier, or the Doomsday Glacier as it is better known in scientific circles, in the Antarctic from the warm waters which are steadily destabilising it by anchoring flexible, buoyant curtains to the seabed are proceeding apace.
It emerged this week that polar researchers will send underwater robots down into the Pine Island Trough in the Amundsen Sea – a potential location for the curtains – during an expedition in January.
It is to be hoped they are successful in their geoengineering endeavours. If Thwaites, which is around the same size as the United Kingdom, was to melt down entirely it could raise global sea levels by up to three feet, flood towns and cities around the world and force hundreds of millions of people to leave their homes.
Fear not, there is no need to put the kids in the car and head for higher ground quite yet. Brainy eco boffins have estimated it will, even with 50 billion metric tons of ice being lost every year due to climate change, carbon emissions from fossil fuel use at a record high and temperatures steadily rising, take a few more centuries to disappear.
Will MSPs have successfully abolished the two year registrations which children at elite clubs in the Club Academy Scotland system sign when they turn 15 before it vanishes completely? Do not hold your breath.
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To say that our elected representatives move at a glacial pace is something of an understatement. At times, in fact, they can make Thwaites look like the legendary Liverpool flyer Steve Heighway.
It is 15 years now since the campaign group RealGrassroots lodged a petition entitled Improving Youth Football in Scotland at Holyrood. It is five years since the Public Petions Committee released its final report on it and recommended “very strongly” that the controversial agreements be scrapped.
They have been amended slightly since. Kids at that age now commit for a shorter period of time. If their clubs refuse to release them for whatever reason they can argue their case to an independent Player Wellbeing Panel. But they remain, to the deep concern of many, firmly in place.
The Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland (CYPCS) has argued they breach six articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which MSPs voted to incorporate into domestic law in 2020, and called for them to be abolished.
In his evidence to the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee back in June, Nick Hobbs, head of legal at the CYPCS, claimed that kids were effectively being exploited for monetary gain.
“The underlying issue here, and it always has been, is that the clubs principally view these children as economic assets and have rules and processes in place which allow them to be monetised,” he said. “The SFA has made rules which are in the interests of clubs and not of the children.”
You would have thought that Ian Maxwell and Neil Doncaster, the SFA and SPFL chief executives, would have been grilled about why the registrations are still being used when they appeared in front of the same committee on Tuesday.
Incredibly, MSPs failed to raise the topic during exchanges which lasted well over an hour.
It is entirely understandable why our leading professional clubs want to retain multi-year registrations. They plough hundreds of thousands of pounds, millions of pounds even, into rearing gifted youngsters every year in the hope they will one day be able to represent their first team and sold on for a profit.
Their outstanding prospects have been increasingly plundered by English clubs, who are no longer able to sign players under the age of 18 from mainland Europe due to Brexit, in recent seasons.
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Tying them down for longer periods, then, means they don’t head down south for buttons the minute they turn 16 and ensures the considerable investment which has been ploughed into their development doesn’t go completely to waste.
It would be very bad for Scottish football indeed if clubs decided to shut down their academies because they had become financially unviable. The introduction of the Player Wellbeing Panel could be regarded a reasonable compromise, a solution to a complex and delicate situation.
But the game in this country does not, alas, have a great track record when it comes to protecting the wellbeing of youngsters. Great strides forward have certainly been made in this important area. It is to be hoped the horrific sexual abuse of children which was widespread in years gone by has been consigned to history due to the safeguards which are now in place. But there is no place for complacency.
Youth football campaigners claimed a victory in midweek when Doncaster confirmed the “development contribution” rule had been binned, the “no approach” rule would be done away with and the “no poach” rule was being scrutinised with stakeholders. But why is that the state of play five years down the line? Why do any of them exist? And why are wee boys still signing multi-year registrations?
The words of Fraser Wishart, the PFA Scotland chief executive, sprang to mind as his SPFL counterpart spoke. “If they are told to scrap these rules their next step will be to say, ‘What is the absolute minimum we can do so we can fudge this?’,” he said in these pages back in April. “The response will be to say, ‘How can we get away with this now?’.”
MSPs must raise their games. Incorporating the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into domestic law looked good for Holyrood. But our politicians are talking the talk, not walking the walk.
They have been reluctant to involve themselves in football since the catastrophic Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012 was repealed in 2018. Hell will freeze over before they do. But their intransigence is putting boys in Scottish football at the very real risk of exploitation and harm.
